Empirical Evidence of Dynamic Interactions Among Price Level, Interest Rate, Money Supply and Real Income: The Case of the Indian Economy

Monetary policy approaches in India have changed from the simple monetary targeting frameworks in the mid-1980s to the multiple-indicator approach in the late 1990s and to the current flexible inflation targeting framework. The study aims to investigate the relationships among the macroeconomic variables money supply, real income, price level and interest rate for the period 1998–2014 in the case of India, a period when India adopted the multiple-indicator approach as its monetary policy strategy. The study uses the vector autoregression (VAR) model to examine the dynamic relationships among the variables. The Granger causality test via the VAR framework suggests that four pairs of causality exist; in particular, bidirectional causality exists between money supply and price level. Interest rate Granger-causes both real income and price level, and money supply Granger-causes the rate of interest. However, the study could not find any causal relationship between real income and money supply in either direction. The findings that money supply causes the interest rate and the interest rate causes real output are in line with the Keynesian theory, which argues that money supply affects output through the nominal interest rate. Finally, the results also support the arguments made in favour of a policy move from the multiple-indicator approach to the inflation targeting framework in India.